A facile approach to synthesize ZnO-decorated titanium carbide nanoarchitectures to boost up the photodegradation performance

The current era of nanotechnology has provided numerous impressive opportunities to purify ever-increasing water impurities. Of them, photodegradation of industrial dyes is one of the best strategies to solve this prob-lem effectively using cost-effective photocatalysts. MXene has been considered as an efficient photocatalytic material however, its transport properties suffer due to the re-stacking of its flakes. Moreover, a very low bandgap of MXene causes electron/hole recombination which is a major drawback of a photocatalyst. Herein, we explored 2D/2D composite nanoarchitectures to stop this re-stacking in MXene by applying Zinc oxide nano-flakes (ZnO NFKs) with Ti3C2Tx (MXene) to solve this outstanding issue. The as-synthesized composite nano-architectures not only degraded the 99.9% Methylene Blue (MB) dye within 40 min but also demonstrated excellent antibacterial activity. We hope the work presented here will be a great help for the young researchers exploring the hybrid 2D-2D composite nanoarchitectures for various applications.

Automated summary

By introducing zinc oxide nano-flakes into MXene, we successfully prepared 2D/2D composite nanostructures to address the issues of reduced transport properties and electron/hole recombination. This composite nanostructures not only efficiently degraded dyes, but also demonstrated excellent antibacterial activity.